The sonic performance of the 1AC invests reinvests into capitalism through positing music as a potential site of ontological transformation---but that only distracts from material movements that build global solidarity.

To clear some muddied waters, let me begin by asking, What does language do that bodies don't? At the most basic level, there is a fundamental difference between a body moving to music and that of bodies en masse fighting for political reform. The former is a reflex that can be crafted and recrafted to perform within different sonically sculptured scenes; the latter functions as a phatic, bodily extension to emphasize political demands for radical reform. To put it simply, a body's kinesthetic response to music that can be shaped into dance is not equivalent to language (sign and phatic gesture) that is necessary not just for the survival of the human race, but for the communication needed to build solidarity between proletariat groups worldwide for revolution to take place. So while the impulse might be to read dancing bodies as counterhegemonic rhythmic cartographies that resist dominant paradigms and articulate a subaltern history, culture, and consciousness, music and/or the body's movement in response to music quite simply does not have the same ontological equivalence as language. This is not to say that a rhythmic cartography such as Nortec does not cross borders. As the brief discussion of techno above points out, Nortec participates in a rich history of techno's diasporic movements and hybridizing of musical genres. However, this connection to hybridizing at the level of music culture and genre is not to be confused with acts of linguistic communication-whether counterhegemonic or not. Musical rhythms and body movements might jell together and form communities, such as Latinos with salsa or meringue, Tijuanenses and Nortec, thrash metal and white suburban male teenagers, or ska and British underclassers. However, such dance/music cartographies are not text-acts equivalent to the linguistic structures that inform language. They could [END PAGE 153] never be, then, considered the same as the language required for communication in order to build coalition and incite revolution. Nortec, or any dance/music rhythmic cartography, cannot do what is required of hundreds of thousands of people gathered together on the streets to overturn the formation of nation-states by bourgeois elites with its drawing of boundaries, establishment of institutions, and laws (judicial and legislative branches) and government (executive branch) to enforce the material reality of the existence of these borders that delimit the territory within which the ruling class can rule. So what are we to make of scholars who conflate language and dance/ music compositions?8 What are we to make of the formulation of music/ dance as a counterhegemonic discourse where power is no longer locatable in bourgeois institutional centers used to command, to dominate, to oppress and to exploit in the hands of one social class and its institutions (the State)? Where the text is the world and therefore dance/music is a text invested with the weight of the power that exists in the real of reality. The tendency of such scholars is to posit these musicscapes as referential, and therefore as potential sites of ontological transformation. Such scholars can theorize music as having a magical power to reterritorialize the restrictive capitalist nation-state because they identify it as a discursively referential construct. However, if the nation-state is neither a textual construct nor an imagined community, but rather the very real drawing up of boundaries, establishment of institutions and laws by a bourgeoisie to enforce the very real and violent oppression of the working class, then we must reassess such declarations. We must reassess the reading given subaltern-identified "rhythmic cartography" or "audiotopia" as referential acts equivalent to speech-acts or text-acts invested with the equivalent power to destabilize a real global capitalism.9 This confusion of a cultural form with ontological fact embraces the type of relativism and constructivism that I stand against at the very outset of this book. Such criticism muddles musical aesthetics and dance compositions with ontological fact that does little to build an understanding of music and its function. As Keith Negus aptly reminds, "Music cannot simply reflect an individual's personality or life, a nation, a city or 'the age we live in'. That word, reflection, is one that slips very easily into both academic discourse and everyday conversations about popular music. But no music can be a mirror and capture events or activities in its melodies, rhythms and voices. The world, a society, an individual life, or even a particular incident, is far too complex for any cultural product [END PAGE 154] (book, film, or song) to be able to capture and spontaneously 'reflect'" (Popular Music in Theory 4).